Lena Horne, the legendary singer who broke racial barriers in the entertainment industry, died yesterday in Manhattan at age 92. The Brooklyn-born Horne once said, "I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept. I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked."

According to the NY Times obituary, she was the first black performer to be signed to a long-term contract by a major Hollywood studio and... went on to achieve international fame as a singer... Ms. Horne might have become a major movie star, but she was born 50 years too early, and languished at MGM in the 1940s because of the color of her skin, although she was so light-skinned that, when she was a child, other black children had taunted her, accusing her of having a 'white daddy.'"

She was usually cast in ensemble musicals, where she didn't interact with other white performers and her singing parts could be cut out; she said, "Mississippi wanted its movies without me. So no one bothered to put me in a movie where I talked to anybody, where some thread of the story might be broken if I were cut."